Latest OmniWeb Sneakypeek

[chmorley]

Okay, I have been (and remain) one of the big boosters of Mozilla around here. However, I continue to try other browsers regularly. I was starting OmniWeb yesterday and it informed me there was a newer sneakypeek available. I had never seen it do this for a sneakypeek before. I downloaded it and began trying it. It is sneakypeek 91.

This thing is fast.

It may be as fast as Mozilla and Chimera. As unbelievable as that sounds (and I haven't done my own benchmarks), it is much faster than the latest beta release of 4.1.

It still has the same rendering problems it has had all along (check out the pulldowns at cbs.sportsline.com), but it is finally up to par with the fastest OS X browsers out there. You can download it here.

As always, these reflect the speeds of these products on my machine. Your mileage may vary.

Now if it only had tabs...

Chris

 

[King Cobra]

I did just try out tis new OmniWeb and it seems to run considerably faster than the old OmniWeb (4.0.x). However, I still think that Netscape may have the edge on speed. I have the 7.0 beta and under dial-up it runs faster than any other browser I currently use/have tried, except for Mozilla RC 2. I will grant OmniWeb the edge on appearance and native running with OS X integration, along with not being a "heavy" browser, but Netscape 7 seems to be slightly easier to use and has more options. Plus I do not have to pay for it.

I am sure that both browsers have their work cut out for them. If I didn't have Netscape/Mozilla, OmniWeb would be a suitable alternative for me.
__________________

Fear the King.

 

[sparkleytone]

its not anywhere near as fast as mozilla, especially the mach-o builds.

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/latest-trunk/MacMozilla-MachO.dmg.gz

 

[chmorley]

Your mileage may vary

Never ceases to surprise me how different people's results are on different machines. I am not going to try to convince anyone that they are wrong, since I trust people only post such things after making their own comparisons. When people don't, it (their ignorance) shows.

On my machine, Netscape 7 is probably a bit faster, but doesn't render a few pages I use all the time correctly. Besides, I hate the AOL bloat. You can't spell bloat without A-O-L. KC, I have tried Netscape 7 and can't figure out how it is "easier" or how it has "more options" than OW. The Netscape folks have disabled some of the best features of Mozilla--including the option to block pop-ups that both Mozilla and OW share. Can you explain what you mean?

The Mach-O builds of Mozilla are also a bit faster, but don't render a couple of my most important pages (e.g., ESPN.com) correctly. I download them regularly, hoping that this will change. So far it has not. Strange to me that the "regular" OS X builds don't have this problem.

However, I am not going to start arguing against Mozilla. It is still the most stable, most complete browser available for OS X--and from here on out my primary browser must have tabs. Hopefully more users will be willing to try Mozilla and learn how great it is. Still, my biggest complaint about OmniWeb has been it's (lack of) speed. It's now at least in the same ballpark as Mozilla. That's an impressive improvement. I hope the OmniGroup keeps it up.

If your results are different on your machine, oh well. This is my experience on a TiBook 667 with 512 megs of RAM.

Chris

 

[Catfish_Man]

I've...

...been getting the latest OW sp builds for a while now, sp91 is somewhat faster on my beige G3, but nothing spectacular. Its biggest slowdown is the way it handles tables. Try going to the arstechnica forums with it and watch the columns resize repeatedly (and slowly). For certain pages it would probably *double* the rendering speed if it got the colum width right the first time. btw, OW is my default browser until chimera can match its features.

 

[CountZero]

Just install sp91 myself and it is noticeably faster, though still not as fast as IE or even Netscape 7. It still looks the best, I think.